


Inevitability

by Desiderii



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Alternate Universe - Wings, M/M, Mutation, Post Reichenbach, Wingfic, Wings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-21
Updated: 2012-12-21
Packaged: 2017-11-21 21:09:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/602104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Desiderii/pseuds/Desiderii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock has wings and is not dead (sort of?) and John has claws and glows in the dark. It's post-Reichenbach, the far future, and all John wants is a second chance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inevitability

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was created for [221t-tardis-st](http://221t-tardis-st.tumblr.com) on tumblr for the [sherlocksecretsanta](http://sherlocksecretsanta.tumblr.com) exchange. I am apparently physically incapable of writing anything shorter than 10k (that's my next challenge), and this kind of flailed its way into being. So... MERRY SHERLOCKMAS 221t-tardis-st!

John sat on a bench holding a cup of coffee and watched the London traffic. Coming back from the frontier for a second time had left him thinking he knew what to expect, knew how to handle the transition. And, for the most part, things were going well, except that this time he knew precisely what he was missing.

He also knew there was nothing he could do about it. It was one thing to never admit your feelings for someone. It was a completely different thing to realize you should probably have committed to those feelings before the object of your affections threw themselves off a goddamned building.

Three years was not a great deal of time in the grand scheme of things. He had reenlisted with a genetic defense unit quite outside the military, passing the fitness tests by the skin of his teeth despite his former injury. The pseudo-military division hadn’t cared about his prior discharge, and neither had Mary. Their wartime fling had lasted until John had encountered an enemy’s biological weapons whose payload used virus transmission to hack his DNA to bitty pieces.

No one was ever sure precisely what sort of chimera would result from an active virus. John had his virus locked into dormancy, been stamped with a chimera’s discharge, and sent home. Mary had stayed, bidding him a fond farewell and promising to send him Christmas cards, though she didn’t promise they’d arrive anywhere in the vicinity of Christmas. He rather missed her, but the frontier was distant and surreal, and John had never lived in London with her. Missing her held quality entirely different than missing his old flatmate.

His coffee was shite, too. The shop where he’d gotten tea before had closed, or moved, or something and another one had taken up residence. He’d avoided the tea, just in case. The coffee had been a mistake, but he’d wanted to try something different. New. Something that didn’t remind him of why he’d left.

Last time he’d been in London, he’d pestered Stamford and ended up having the most ridiculous series of actual adventures of his life. Adventures. Not missions or experiences or anything nearly so mundane, but real honest-to-goodness adventures. He’d lost that. Grieved for that and Sherlock, too. Moving on after losing his anchor had been one of the hardest things he’d ever done.

He was lost in reminiscing for long enough that when Sherlock sat down on the bench next to him he accepted the change as natural. Why wouldn’t Sherlock sit next to him? He was back in London, watching the double-decker busses dodging gravless bicycles and thinking about how far techology’d come in just the three years he’d spent in space.

“Glad to be back?”

The voice stopped his heart, dousing him hot and cold and sending a cascade of chills down his spine. He extended his claws out of reflex only to have them slide smoothly into the paper sides of his cup to send coffee spilling down onto his trousers. He straightened his spine and froze, stock-still, to fight back a surge of panic.

The cautions of his medical discharge returned all at once. Hallucinations were part of the parcel of an active chimera virus. His virus had been declared dormant, unlikely to reactivate, and that was the only reason they’d let him out of the hospital. It shouldn’t be active again and it especially shouldn’t be trying to rearrange the inside of his brain. The bioluminescent stripes across John’s neck, torso, and arms - gifts of the virus along with the claws - started to warm to a vibrant red as the sudden jolt of unreality hit him.

He had seen the blood on the sidewalk. He had been there when they called the time of death. There had been no way to bring Sherlock back and they had tried everything that modern technology could offer. Even though they should have been able to save him, nothing had worked.

Turning his head and wheezing a bit, he stared hard at Sherlock. Sherlock who had a pair of gloriously rich brown wings capped with a shimmer of blue that draped over the back of the bench. He wore them with the same confident, careless attitude with which he wore everything else.

“You’re dead.” They had _specifically_ warned him about throwback hallucinations. It meant that the virus was changing something deep inside the brain and fucking with sensory input. He might have superpowers at the end of the infection. Just as likely, however, he could become a drooling mass as his higher brain function shut down so his gray matter could crystallize and convert itself to a quantum trinary format. Throwback hallucinations were a sign of the bad sort of brain fuckery.

“Technically,” Sherlock offered him a small smile, “I’m an anomaly.”

“Alive then?”

“Technically.”

“I saw you hit.”

“Well, no. You didn’t.”

“I saw you bleeding.”

“That you did see.” Sherlock nodded, agreeable.

“And now you’re a what?”

“A temporal anomaly.”

“I’m talking to empty air, aren’t I?”

“Technically.”

“Lots of technicalities. Are you alive or aren’t you?”

“Yes.” Sherlock screwed his face up in disgust. “And no.”

“If I try to deck you, will I hit anything?”

“Yes.”

“Will I look like a crazy babbling person in the park?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure it’s not the chimera virus turning my brain into pudding?”

“Were you completely devoid of the chimera virus, I would still be sitting here.”

John decided it was worth a shot. He shook the cup free of his claws, spattering the grass with cheap coffee, balled his fist and beckoned for Sherlock to stand. “Up.”

Sherlock stood, flaring his wings for balance. He braced himself and looked mildly amused.

“Fuck you.” John told him and swung. The blow connected with flesh and Sherlock’s head rocked back. He looked a little dazed. He looked dazed now like he’d looked dazed then after he’d demanded that John ‘punch him in the face’ and John had quipped something about subtext. This was deja vu and repeating memories with some pretty fucked up differences and John was pretty goddamned fucking sure he should go get his brain checked with a laser because this was impossible. John ruthlessly shoved down a welling of angry tears as the light crisscrossing his knuckles blazed blood red. “Don’t you fucking leave like that.”

Sherlock spat blood and, well, maybe John hadn’t quite avoided his teeth this time so it wasn’t quite the same. That gave him hope that this wasn’t the virus rummaging through his memories and regurgitating all the things he wanted to hear.

“I was required the utmost secrecy.” Something not quite apologetic flicked across Sherlock’s face. “You could not be informed.”

“I can keep a goddamned secret.”

“John-” Sherlock stressed his name. “Your anger is understandable, but I needed to be taken out of-”

“My life?” John snapped, well aware that he was making a scene, talking to thin air in the middle of the park, covered in coffee. Still, he couldn’t become un-angry just because Sherlock was continuing as blithely as if he’d never been dead to John for three years.

“Time. Taken out of time.” Sherlock corrected, looking a strange mixture of haughty and bruised at John’s interjection. “That was the final problem I had to solve, how to secure more freedom for myself by stepping out of sync with causal time. Each of us has to discover the trick to it on our own. Moriarty allowed me my out even as he took his own.”

“What the hell?” If this wasn’t Sherlock it still sounded like him, looked like him - barring the absolutely massive wings sprouting from somewhere in the vicinity of his shoulders - and sure as hell tried John’s patience like the real deal.

Sherlock waved his hand in the air, gesturing vaguely at the past and folding and refolding his wings, “Ever since the people of two hundred years ago sorted out how to slip the timestream... it’s like the holy grail, the philosopher’s stone, El Dorado, and the fountain of youth all rolled into one big glorious package that sits tauntingly a fraction beyond understanding.” Sherlock colored faintly before continuing, “Part of why it’s so poorly understood is that the confirmational experiment only functions properly if you’ve the understanding to make it happen, like a vicious circle. Upon confirmation you get dragged from reality. Kicking and...” Sherlock’s suddenly got much quieter. “Screaming.”

John didn’t what the mental image of ‘kicking and screaming’ if Sherlock wasn’t being metaphorical. “And the wings?”

“Mutational side effect of altered probabilities, though they are fully functional. Impossibly so, I’m afraid. Not sure what’ll happen if I step back into your prime reality. They might collapse into some other form of mutation or simply defy local universal physics. Hard to tell. Both have happened before.” Sherlock paused briefly before delivering a brilliant smile. “I’ve become rather fond of them.”

“Good for you.” John’s claws sheathed and unsheathed. The chimera virus had given him an interesting mix of mutations. No wings, but retractable claws on his fingers and toes and all of the biolumes that crisscrossed his body. He’d escaped tails, scales, and faceted eyes. Oh- and death. He’d also escaped death. One could never be too grateful when most mutations caused death. Before it went dormant, the virus had added growths on either shoulder and muddied his trachea a bit so that it was hard to breathe.

John fixed Sherlock with a flat glare. He leaves the planet for three years and comes back part cat, part plankton with possibly some attempted fish thrown in for good measure. Sherlock dies and comes back with proper wings and magic powers.

Sherlock frowned. “Come now, John. I returned as quick as I could.”

“Three years is ‘quick’?”

“You were offplanet.” Sherlock replied with dignity. “And my grasp of linear time has gotten a bit... hazy.”

“Offplanet- You would have come back sooner if I hadn’t been offplanet?”

“Of course.” Sherlock said it like it was no big deal. Like John hadn’t gotten on with his life without his best mate just as they’d begun the overtures to something confusing and intense and a little bit more than ‘best mates’.

John boggled. “Of course! Of course, he says. Fuck.”

“Did you hate being back on the frontier that much? I seem to recall you were quite satisfied with a life of excitement.”

Closing his eyes and taking a deep breath through the rattle in his lungs, John forced himself to give the question its due. “No.” He said after a long pause. “No I didn’t. Never a dull moment and I had Mary there to share it with.”

“Now you’re back and we can pick up where we left off.”

“Really?” John could be a sarcastic son of a bitch when he wanted to. “Can we really?”

“Whyever not?” And even if Sherlock made it sound like he was surprised by John’s objection, the wings gave it away. He held them tense, poised on the edge of flight.

“Because you fucking killed yourself and left me behind. Disappeared. Let me think you were dead. I cried over your grave, you ass. I cried over your grave and say ‘fuck it’ because every corner of London reminded me of you. So I left and got on with life.”

John knew he was spiraling into a rant, but he could not stop himself. He had his fingers in his hair, his claws kept pricking his scalp, and the red glow of all his biolumes were tinging his shirt with bloody light. “I got along without you and hated that it was so easy. When you were here, you helped me sort out where I stood, what I wanted, and I used every bit of that to fling myself back to the stars.

“You were completely improbable and half a dream, and then I woke up. You saved me, anchored me, and then vanished with enough finality that I _had_ to move on. I was fine. I _was_ fine. If you’re really you and this is not just some swan song of my dying neurons, it means I have a fantastic choice now. I can be better than fine or worse than fine, but I’m not going to still be fine. So no, there’s no such thing as picking up where we _fucking_ left off.”

Sherlock looked wrong-footed and uncertain, off-balance at John’s diatribe. Stricken, he began, “John-”

“Don’t- don’t ‘John’ me.”

Sherlock backtracked, steering clear of John’s outburst entirely and rearranging his expression into the serene mask he used when he was trying for both aloof and amused. “If I can’t ‘John’ you, then I shall be forced to talk about something else. Let me see. Ah- I have good news and I have bad news.”

“And isn’t that just like you.” John muttered. Louder, he said, “What is it?”

“The good news is that I’m here to play guardian angel.” Sherlock told him, gesturing at wings and self before a small smile flashed over his face. It was brief and subtle, reminding John of all the times Sherlock had tried to draw a laugh from John and wasn’t entirely sure how the joke would go over. Ashtrays. Quips. The smile encompassed them all, too familiar in a way that squeezed John’s heart.

Giving in after a beat, John smiled, just a bit. “Yes. Fine. Okay. I get it. Guardian angel. And the bad news?”

“Ah-” Sherlock hesitated. “Someone will be trying to kill you.”

John hadn’t expected that. “Oh hell.” It figured. He took a breath, then another, and said again, “Hell.” Before he could second-guess his decision, he reached up and pulled Sherlock down to meet him, mashing their lips together in a rough kiss. After a brief flurry of wings, Sherlock caught his balance and curled every part of him around John, arms and wings folding in and around as John held them locked together with one hand on the back of Sherlock’s neck. The other hand John balled into a fist at his side.

When they parted, John had to back through feathers. His little section park was conspicuously devoid of people. A man muttering and ranting to himself and snogging invisible people earned a wide berth, it seemed. John wiped his mouth and eyed Sherlock speculatively. Sherlock wore a deliberately neutral expression, but his eyes were warm.

John didn’t bother to disguise the hitch in his voice when he said, “I missed you.”

Sherlock shrugged his wings back into place, folding them politely down his back so that they arched up above either shoulder. “Glad you’re back planetside.” His eyebrows dipped and he frowned, reaching behind his head to daub at the back of his neck. Dispassionately, he observed the blood on his fingers for a long moment before wiping them onto his coat. “Mind the claws.”

With a huff of laughter, John hunched his shoulders and stuck his hands in his pockets. “Should have done that before. The kissing. Not the scratching.” Sherlock raised an eyebrow and John snorted. “Scratching too, if you want. Just fucking tell me that you’re not actually dead next time.”

Sherlock hid a smile. “Where are you staying now?”

“Where else?” John shrugged at Sherlock’s amused laugh. “She wouldn’t let me look for another place.”

**

221b Baker street had felt eerily unchanged when he’d moved back in. Mrs. Hudson had insisted, more or less, and John hadn’t the heart to tell her that it brought back memories he found hard to deal with. Except- they’d been less hard to deal with than he’d anticipated. Three years and a sympathetic shoulder had left him remembering the good and feeling fond about about the bad.

He was feeling significantly less fond as he made tea. The absence of dismembered corpses in the refrigerator and the addition of being able to use the kitchen table had been pleasant changes. The prospect of Sherlock bringing all of that nonsense back with him was less than appealing. John’s trousers also smelled like cheap coffee, rather spoiling his appreciation of the open tin of teabags.

“So when Mrs. Hudson says that your brother has been paying for the flat...” John leaned back against the kitchen counter and stared at Sherlock over the top of his tea mug. Mrs. Hudson had taken the news that John had seen Sherlock today in stride, patting him on the cheek. He hadn’t been able to tell if she thought he was touched in the head or- “Does that mean that they both were expecting you back?”

Sherlock ran his fingers along the mantle, absent most of his knicknacks, his knife and the skull. Mrs. Hudson had made John leave Sherlock’s things after he packed them up. When John had left the flat had been pristine.

The dust left a film on Sherlock’s fingers that he licked away with a contemplative look on his face. “No. I arranged with Mycroft to hold the flat for you using some of the funds we earned through my work. In the event of your return to London, you were to be... encouraged to move back in.”

“If I hadn’t wanted to?” John asked.

Sherlock furrowed his brows at John. “Why wouldn’t you?”

John drank his tea and did not respond.

“I needed you here.” Sherlock gave in and explained. “Here is familiar, a present that I can understand. I don’t have a lot of reference for the ‘now’ of three years after I died.”

John filed away his ‘disapproving-tea-drinking’ expression for later use. “So you’re not ‘now’. That’s why I’m the only one that can see you?”

“More or less. It is an adequate shorthand for a more complicated phenomena.”

“Brilliant.” John set his mug down gently when he mostly just wanted to throw it at Sherlock’s face. “So I can see you precisely why?”

Sherlock stepped back and studied the hearth and did not look at John, avoiding answering for a for a long moment. His wings half-spread, he took up most of the living room. “You’re my anchor.”

John’s eyebrows climbed as high as they could go. “I’m your what?” Surely he had not heard that aright. It sounded almost sentimental.

Turning, Sherlock snapped his wings closed and repeated himself matter-of-factly. “You’re my anchor. My- my temporal anchor.”

Less sentiment, then and more of the rubbish that had given him wings. John dug his claws into the counter and said, tone flat, “Temporal anchor.”

“You. Here in this flat. The combination thereof. Temporal anchor. If I wanted to come back, I needed an anchor. Someone I trusted implicitly. Someone I loved who I would want to seek again even when I had the whole of time to explore, unconstrained by cause and effect. Without an anchor, I would be lost. Bewinged and bemused by the wonders between dark and light.”

Folding his arms, John said, “I didn’t get consulted in any of this.”

On the inside, though, John was doing a handful of mental jumping jacks to process the concept that Sherlock had used him specifically because he loved him. _Someone I love._ They hadn’t gotten to the point of declarations before. He needed to get a handle on this moodring crap his new racing stripes were doing. He was flaring red again, his stripes pulsing from dull to brilliant as a cascade of emotions coursed through him. Anger. Fear. A jolt of unrepentant joy and hope.. Sherlock wouldn’t even need to use any of his vaunted powers of observation to read him like a goddamned open book.

“You couldn’t have been informed. If you had even an inkling of what I were to do, my attempt to anchor with you would have drawn you outside as well.” Sherlock’s chin lifted in challenge. “Screaming. Drawn you outside _screaming_. That was unacceptable.” It was a new thing that John was able to tell so much of what Sherlock was thinking. The great bloody wings would not stay still, flashing with iridescent blue even in the low light of the flat. Sherlock was half-mantling, augmenting the challenge in his tone. Challenge present, of course, because he knew John well enough to know that he was going to object. Strenuously. Sherlock wanted to be right, was ready to defend his choices if the wings were any indication, but he wasn’t right and they both knew it.

“Leave a note!” John threw his hands in the air. He was pretty much not okay with Sherlock taking advantage of their mutual undeclared affection for whatever his crap experiment had been. John wouldn’t be feeling like he was breathing through sludge ever since the virus went dormant if Sherlock had never left. John would have never left Earth if Sherlock hadn’t decided to unexpectedly off himself. “Something! Anything. Keep me on Earth! Have Mycroft send Althea or whatever her name is. Tell me you love me to my face, so at least I have that.” The last part came out far more seriously than John had intended.

“Oh.” Sherlock immediately backed off, snapping his wings shut. He sounded halfway to apologetic when he said, “I left that undone.”

“You bloody well left _that_ undone. Whatever _that_ is.”

“And if I offer you a sincere apology?”

John couldn’t help a faint smile at that, but when he spoke the words were hard. Final too, maybe, but John didn’t want to think that too loudly just in case the virus had done a number on his brain while he wasn’t paying attention. “Too little. Too late. But I left things undone, too, regrets and blame and- just- I can’t pick up where we left off. It’s been three years for me, no matter how long its been for you.” He couldn’t stand the puzzled, faintly lost expression on Sherlock’s face, so he turned away. Anger gave way, suddenly, to exhaustion, and John had to clutch the counter. His biolume stripes faded to a pale glow.

After a long moment of quiet, filled only with the rustle of feathers and the click of John’s claws as he fussed with making himself another mug of tea, arms wrapped John from behind and Sherlock settled his chin on John’s shoulder. John went rigid, shoulders tense and hands stilled. He clutched the soggy teabag too tightly and accidentally sliced it open, spices and leaves spilling all over the counter.

Without responding to Sherlock’s embrace one way or the other, neither accepting nor rejecting, John fished another teabag out of the tin and dropped it into his mug, filling it from the electric kettle to steep. Sherlock pressed his cheek against John’s, his arms and wings enfolding John and pulling him away from the counter as soon as the first curl of color stained the water. He did no more than that, content just to hold John and wait for his reaction.

John didn’t particularly want to react, because then he’d have to make a choice. Better than fine or not fine at all?

“Start over? Start different, then?” Sherlock asked, and whatever he’d seen and experienced on the outside had changed him more than physically. This Sherlock was holding back from the demand John could taste in the air. It was there, part and parcel of all their time together before, where Sherlock walked the line between insufferably arrogant and desperately vulnerable, so very human that it raked at John’s heart to remember.

“We couldn’t very well start the same.” John said, bringing his hands up and grasping Sherlock’s forearms where they wrapped across his upper chest. The biolumes lit the inner curve of Sherlock’s wings, a red glimmer against brown and blue. “And not just because of the obvious changes.”

Feathers, light, escaping the space-time continuum, and the wicked set of claws that John was trying very hard to not use to cling with all changed things, yes, but they were just trappings. Incidental changes. Acceptable changes. Three years, another planet, and a casual lover had changed John one direction. A death, a step out of time, and the awareness of the miracles beyond the crushing jaws of linearity, familiarity, and reality had changed Sherlock in another. The sometimes alien cast to Sherlock’s features had become more pronounced, leaving him fae in the way the older, sharper, more dangerous folktales portrayed inhumanity.

John couldn’t relax, but he didn’t want to push Sherlock away. Starting over sounded impossible and, strangely, the idea comforted him. Sherlock had never bothered to pay attention to such boring concepts as ‘impossible’, ‘never’, and ‘everyone else’. God help him, that’s part of why John had come back _here_ of all places. Sherlock’s inability to be resurrected by modern technology had been impossible.

A crack on the head or some loss of blood was nothing to a hospital that could spray on a layer of new flesh or install a bionic limb as casually as a coronary bypass. That his old hospital had been able to do nothing as Sherlock’s heart stopped and his body grew cold had been impossible.

Even while thinking that Sherlock had always been one for the impossible, even grieving and moving on and returning to the edge of space, John had held out for a miracle.

Sherlock considered John’s words and tightened his hold, crushing John back against him. “A new foundation, then. All that’s gone before.”

A new foundation. Different than the old. John could do that. Wanted to do that, truth be told, because he couldn’t forget the affection, the feeling of home, that he’d always felt simmering under the surface whenever he was around Sherlock. Alongside irritation and baffled frustration sometimes, yes, but affection still. He had a second chance.

John leaned his head against Sherlock, pressing their cheeks together. He did not relax, did not otherwise move, but it was enough. Sherlock’s grasp on him tightened, squeezed down until all John saw were feathers and all he felt were Sherlock’s arms heavy across his chest and the whisper of lips along his cheek to his ear.

“Good.” Sherlock said. “Good.” A guardian angel should never sound so predatory, but it made John smile.

Things would be different this time. John’s first, fierce thought was that he was better able to hold on, now, with a grip that could draw blood. He did not unbend, though, or sag against the chest pressed to his shoulder-blades, where Sherlock had bent down and curled tight against him. The hold was reassuring, and John had tea cooling on the counter.

John stuck his hand out through Sherlock’s wings and grabbed the mug, pulling his tea through the protective curtain of feathers and taking a sip. Then there were no more feathers.

For half a heartbeat of pure panic, John was alone in his kitchen, drinking tea and standing soldier-straight, staring firmly at the cupboards. I have gone mad. His biolumes flared neon-bright, the whole kitchen taking on red highlights from the few stripes his long sleeves and high collar left uncovered. _The virus woke. My brain-_

Then Sherlock was back. He coiled around John again, breathless and full of tension that shivered down his arms and sent John immediately into high alert. Low, urgent, Sherlock demanded, “Drop your mug and follow it to the floor.”

“What?”

“Oh, for- We don’t have time. I can’t-” Sherlock knocked the side of his head against John’s jaw, a quick tap, the nearest surface able to provide percussive recall. “It’s all out of order-” And then he had it. “Vatican Cameos. Go. Now.”

Sherlock slammed one wing down on John’s wrist and the tea went flying, spattering John’s already coffee-stained trousers. The porcelain shattered against the linoleum. Even after years, John acted on their signal purely through reflex. The grip Sherlock had around him, once a comfortable embrace, turned suddenly into weight dragging him all the faster to join his ill-used tea mug.

John was only halfway to the floor when the shot pierced the window across the room and splintered into the cabinet above him, centered where his head should have been. Once out of sight and below the level of the windows, John scrambled around the kitchen table and crouched, panting hard. His lungs felt even more sluggish than they had earlier and he could hardly catch a full breath. This time John wasn’t unhappy because the only thought the virus was awake. This time it was awake for certain, woken by adrenaline. The virus had broken through the induced dormancy to feed on the hormone. His skin writhed along his collarbone.

Still reacting on instinct and echos of experience, John said, “Sniper. Stay down.” His only thoughts were of how Sherlock had an awful sense of self-preservation sometimes.

Sherlock, however, was in the front room with his wings fully extended, brushing each of the far walls. He stared through the bullet hole in the glass, muttering to himself about trajectories. Right. John needed to worry less about the invisible man who didn’t currently exist and more about himself who was still flesh, blood, and mortal. A complete lack of gray matter would make it hard for even St. Barts to bring him back.

“He’s gone.” Sherlock told him. “He knows he won’t get another shot and isn’t bothering to waste his time.”

“Well, excuse me... for staying down here for a minute.” John snapped, struggling to breathe and hating every moment that he couldn’t because of the goddamned virus. Sherlock couldn’t just magic this ailment away a grasp of psychology and an appeal to John’s sense of adventure. He should have known better than to go back to the frontier. He kept finding increasingly nastier bullets with his shoulder. Next time he went out he’d probably end up struck by a micronuke and Sherlock would be down one anchor.

“John?” Sherlock was on his knees, wings folded, and forced himself between the refrigerator and the table, reaching out his hand. John seized it, squeezing hard until Sherlock grimaced against the pressure. Sherlock looked him over, frowned, and said, “You’re not hit.”

John shook his head and croaked out, “Lungs.” Talking was going to get increasingly more interesting if he no longer had a proper trachea. Or maybe he’d keep the trachea and something else was happening. “Active. Chimera,” he explained, six syllables the last he could manage.

Holding on to Sherlock made this transformation easier than the others. Sherlock, for his part, kept him sheltered in a canopy of dark wings and calmed him with a rumble of soothing words. The content didn’t matter, only the presence that John clung to like a lifeline while he drowned.

The terrifying sensation of his flesh rearranging itself ended abruptly a bare lungful of air after John found he could breathe freely. His skin stopped crawling and the pain on either side of his shoulders faded away. He looked to Sherlock.

“Unfinished mutation.” Sherlock shook his head. “The virus must have burnt itself out with the last flurry of activity. Can you breathe?”

Mutely, John nodded and took a deep breath through his nose. Fine there. He took a breath through his open mouth.

Also fine.

Without really processing the implications, John then took a breath through the new vents beneath his clavicles. Fabric sucked tight to the mesh of muscle and skin as he flexed them open and closed, the glow of red beneath his shirt making it very clear where the stripes had been interrupted to add them.

“Not gills, then.” John breathed with the vents again and it was a strange feeling to neither taste nor smell the air he pulled into his lungs. It was a sterile, absent feeling of lungs filling with air without the complicated sensory input of any of his other biological systems. Releasing Sherlock’s hand, he unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it open so they could both see.

Sherlock leaned in close within the small space protected by his wings, tracing his fingers over the mottled edges of the vents. The new skin was sensitive and John clenched his jaw to keep from twitching away. The gentle touch brought with it a measure of pain. Shelock’s glanced at John’s face, lit only by red light from below, and pulled away with a wordless apology. He continued to study John, however, his gaze lingering on the crisscrossing biolumes where they followed old scars and accented all John’s flaws. He nodded once.

“As I said. Unfinished. The edges are still healing.” Sherlock rocked back on his heels and pulled his wings into their natural resting position. John blinked at the light in the kitchen, half-certain that he’d been fighting pain and nausea for long enough that the sun would be down. As he calmed, his biolumes faded to a faint, pulsing red that reflected each beat of his heart.

Sherlock watched them fade, then continued, “You were lucky. In this reality, all the respiratory systems connected back together before the virus ran out of power. Even more lucky, it ran out of power before it finished.”

“In this reality?” John asked.

“Fish out of water.” Sherlock’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “I like this reality best.”

Now that John was not in imminent danger of dying due to mutation and the chimera virus had flailed through its grand finale, he let himself relax. “Oh, god.” Tension he hadn’t realized he’d been carrying flooded out of him. Every second that the virus had been active meant that it could still access his brain, still turn him into a creature that could only eat silicon, or piss acid, or just straight up kill him by crystallizing all his blood. His cat-almostfish-plankton combination would be inconvenient, and the biolumes were downright distracting, but it could have been so, so much worse. John thought briefly of how many other realities that Sherlock had touched in which he’d watched John die of the virus.

John pressed his back against the lower cupboards and let his head fall against the wood with a thump. Sherlock joined him a bit more awkwardly, knocking noisily against a chair until he could arrange himself so that their shoulders pressed together. Almost shot. Check. Almost grew gills and suffocated. Check. The threat for the latter had lessened, but as long as they were sitting around and discussing horrible things trying to kill John...

He asked, “How’d you know? About the sniper?”

Sherlock performed an odd hesitation and said, “I’m here with you now, yes? But I am also present with you for... about ten seconds on either side of now. The window is narrowing the longer I am in contact with you until I shall be able to step through, but it gives me time to see threats to your person. If you had not dropped when you did, you would be dead.”

The last was said flat and haunted in a way that said a great deal of what was possible within ten seconds on either side of a single moment in time. John’s fingers intertwined with Sherlock’s before he thought consciously of what he was doing. “That bad?”

“Worse. Your assassin is as good a shot through windows as you are.” Sherlock offered him a tight smile before lifting their clasped hands for their mutual inspection. Amusement threaded his words as he deliberately set aside the topic of snipers and assassins. “Starting over, are we?”

Frowning, mock-serious, John nodded. He made a show of brushing a speck of lint from the back of Sherlock’s knuckles and bobbing his head with a ‘hrm’ of satisfaction. He met Sherlock’s eyes and, now that the adrenaline was starting to drain away, allowed a hint of a smile to sneak onto his face. He’d missed all the excitement so goddamned much, because even when nothing made sense and his only anchor had been a Sherlock determined to tease a thread loose to find the clue he needed, John had known that everything would turn out. That same level of almost instinctual trust hadn’t gone. It should, but it hadn’t. What threat was a lone gunman against the two of them?

Sherlock was still infuriatingly Sherlock, despite the ‘translate-Outsider-to-Human’ pauses and the non-linear time induced memory lapses, but he had John’s back. _Someone I love._ A clean surge of exhilaration coursed through John as he let their hands drop to rest on his thigh. He might as well choose ‘better than fine’ and just get it over with.

“Not starting over,” John said, the confidence beneath his words bringing a smirk to Sherlock’s face. “Starting different.”

**

Pulling off his shirt, John rummaged inside of his closet for another that wasn’t stained with tea and embedded with splinters. Arguing over his shoulder as he found a similarly unstained pair of trousers, he said, “I have to go.” Sherlock was being infuriatingly obstructive and their arguments had gotten louder over the last handful of minutes. John had no doubt that Mrs. Hudson thought he was barmy when she could only hear half of the conversation. “The hours after the virus is burnt out are the most dangerous. In and out. It’s quick. We’ll be back immediately and we can hole up until you’re back.”

“John-” And when _Sherlock_ took on a patient tone of voice, it made John worry. He was used to being tersely condescended to. Sherlock was a master of terse, affectionate, condescension, however that worked. This matter-of-fact repetition of the exact same words over and over had John wondering just what Sherlock wasn’t telling him. An ‘I won’t repeat myself’ and an end to the discussion would - at this point - have made John feel a hell of a lot better.

“You were almost sniped through our very own windows,” Sherlock continued. He gestured to the boards that now covered the glass in each, insurance against any more such sniper attacks. The rest of the apartment had been similarly treated, turned it into a fortified base. “Leaving would be suicidal. You can’t just-”

John growled low in his throat, cutting him off. “Staying is suicidal. The virus burnt out. Now it releases crap into my bloodstream as it disintegrates. You don’t want me to stroke out, or have a heart attack, or - I’m damaged enough. I have to go.”

“You’ll be fine if you stay.”

“Do you know that for sure?” John demanded, his biolumes flaring as he pulled on a new shirt and dragged on his trousers, “Did you see it? Do I clot in this reality and die clutching my chest?” Sherlock hesitated and didn’t answer. The hesitation was enough for John. “That seals it. We’re going. Just there and back and try to avoid anyone with guns.”

“You will follow my every instruction.”

John heard an odd note in Sherlock’s voice and turned from his closet mirror to tilt his head at his friend. “You warned me in time for the last attack. Why the doubt?”

“The window is narrowing.” Sherlock said, then followed quickly with, “That’s good. That’s very good. As soon as I am reoriented to your ‘now’, I can step through. But it means less prescience unless I want to restart the process all over again. We can’t afford that. I am- I am less able to help protect you the closer you get to resurrecting me.”

“And here I thought you’d have bad news.” John went to find his coat.

In the ten minutes it had taken for John to have a chat with the medical liaison assigned to his case, Sherlock had found his boxes and scattered his belongings all over the room. The moose head - that John hadn’t bothered to take down, because really who wants a moose head - had its antique headphones again. The skull was back on the mantle. Half of the bookshelves were full again. Giving Sherlock ten minutes to be enthusiastically optimistic about his full return meant John sneezed at the unboxed dust when left his bedroom.

Sherlock had even put his microscope back on the kitchen table. John took one look at the room and asked, “If Mrs. Husdon walked in right this moment and you were transporting your skull from box to mantle, would she see it floating through the air?”

“Of course not.” Sherlock sounded faintly offended by the very notion, which was better than annoyed that John was disobeying him and stepping out the door into full view of an assassin. “Things either are or aren’t. All she’ll ever see is a static reality. All anyone will see is a static reality. Only my anchor gets to see.”

“How much longer do I get to be crazy?” John asked, not really expecting an answer.

“Less than twenty-four hours.”

John blinked. “That’s... not very long.”

“No. The window is narrowing much more quickly than I thought it would. I can see, perhaps, eight seconds or so on either side of the now you’re currently experiencing. I suspect that physical contact has sped the process.”

“That is the worst pickup line I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s no-” Sherlock began, then stopped and laughed. “I suggest we sleep together. Purely so you can prove to Mrs. Hudson you’re not going mad.”

“I don’t think she’d mind if I was.” John said, opening the front door and performing a swift assessment of the threat level of their stairwell out of habit. No lurking murders with sniper rifles. Their stairwell was safe. Though - Sherlock had already checked the entire complex. Killers had lived within the building before, and sneaky assholes carrying dirt-crusted shoes had infiltrated the basement flat. “She was complaining that her life had gotten awfully boring after you’d gone.”

They hailed a cab and settled into the back. The ride was short and Sherlock was mostly silent, focusing on incoming threats and the roofs of buildings. Even a sniper needed time to get into position, and they arrived at St. Barts without a great deal of trouble. John paid the cabby. Best get this over with.

Sherlock shadowed him as they headed for the entrance, wings fully extended. People passed through him without noticing as he stalked behind John and tried to watch in every direction at the same time. John was comforted, somewhat, not just that Sherlock was keeping an eye out with whatever freaky powers he’d earned with his death, but also that a significant portion of the people they passed were modified in some fashion.

John’s mutations had left him a bit self-conscious, even though a long shirt, gloves, and a high collar would hide anything he didn’t wish seen. It was nice to be here and see the epidermal swaps, the spinal protuberances and tiny batwings, and the sweet little girl who had curling ram horns sunk into her skull. Earth had embraced biomod with a vengeance in the last three years, even though it had had started among the soldiers who had come back from the front like John, scarred and changed by the chimera virus.

The “No” that ripped from Sherlock, who was one moment behind him and the next in front, was the only warning that John had. Sherlock shoved John hard in the chest, sending him stumbling back.

A crack-thwip noise reached John’s ears and the wall beside them pinged as the bullet ricocheted. Another crack-thwip garnered similar results as John rolled behind a parked car and out of the line of fire. He’d brought his own gun, but this was a crowded street and they were already lucky that his assassin hadn’t hit anyone else. He had the weapon out as fast as he could and checked the safety, listening hard for any more shots.

John poked his head up over the car hood, leaving cover for a brief look across the street. A man stood there, tall, broad-shouldered, and blond, just tucking the gun into the voluminous pocket of a windbreaker.

The man made no sudden moves, nothing to make him seem suspicious, and even those nearest to him didn’t quite pick up on anything out of the ordinary. He earned a few glances, some of them appreciative, but nothing more. A silenced gun had a unique sound, like construction at a distance, and the air was filled with such sounds even after he’d tucked the weapon away. He began to amble away down the sidewalk, avoiding a knot of pedestrians with a twitch of his shoulders. A shootout seemed low on the gunman’s list of things to do that day now that his surprise attack had failed.

“Who the hell is that?” John snapped over his shoulder at Sherlock, unwilling to chase down his would-be murderer when the exertion could cause him to stroke out. Exchanging fire with someone of the man’s skill was also extremely low on John’s list of things to do that day. He needed a hole in the head like he needed another round with the chimera virus. What he wanted was his damned injection and a return to Baker Street.

Sherlock, however, didn’t reply. When John turned to check on him after making sure that the man had disappeared around a corner, Sherlock hadn’t moved. He was in the same position he’d been in when he’d pushed John back and out of the way. His hands were forward, frozen as if he still felt John’s weight against them.

“Sherlock?” John scrambled to his feet and hurried to Sherlock’s side. He looked more ephemeral than John had ever seen, the wall behind him just faintly visible. A delicate line of cold silver fire pierced the wing closest to the street, threaded across the tops of his shoulders and clipped through the front of his throat. His eyes were stuck wide, unhappy and scared, his fingers splayed and his body off-balance.

People continued to pass through Sherlock, unable to see or touch him, and John started to panic a bit. He circled around to peer at Sherlock’s face, the ghost of him sending a tremor through the part of John which assumed that Sherlock would always be there. The part that had put a hand on his gravestone and demanded every bit of this miracle from the universe.

“Sherlock?” He reached out, trying to reassure himself that Sherlock was still standing by, just a bit out of time. An ordinary bullet couldn’t kill someone who hadn’t yet become real.

Worse still, the place they stood was along the wall where Sherlock had landed, though John had been trying not to think about that particular fact. Another echo, a resurgence of sights and sounds, fears and doubts. John was seeing a ghost where a ghost should be. Loops of his own memory filled in blood at their feet where there was none, an image burnt onto the back of his eyelids though the physical signs had been scraped away by an efficient cleanup crew and three years worth of the elements.

The bullet had been real. John clung to that fact. The bullet real. The gun in his assassin’s hand real as well. Others had turned at the noise, had given quizzical looks to the muscular blond in his windbreaker. Even so, doubt surged and lingered, because John walked alone down the street with an angel peering over his shoulder whose wings drew no attention whatsoever.

John’s hand met flesh, not the ephemeral chill of ectoplasm or mist that John had almost expected. As soon as they touched, Sherlock solidified, stumbled forward, and nearly knocked John off his feet as his wings flapped wildly to compensate for the resumption of forward momentum.

“Bloody hell.” John caught him and held him upright, reassured by how solid Sherlock felt and trying to beat back the horror of having Sherlock gone again. “What was that?”

Sherlock was panting as if he’d run a marathon, his face flushed. “Reflexive self-preservation.” John made an impatient noise and Sherlock offered him an exasperated look before explaining, “Automatic threat response. I leave a shadow behind to hold my place and slip out of time. I would have been able to return on my own if I were fully sychronized.” He sounded disgusted with himself. “The bullet wouldn’t even have hit me. I knew that. Complete reflex.”

“Did it reset your,” John hesitated over the terminology, “window?”

The silence stretched between them. John still had a good grip on Sherlock’s ribs, holding him upright. The warmth that bled from Sherlock’s skin sank into his palms and his claws pricked the fabric of the shirt Sherlock wore. He had a grip, now, and the scare only reinforced John’s determination to keep it.

Eventually, Sherlock shook his head. “No. But it did affect it. I need to be in contact with my anchor all the more if we want to make sure I can come back in a timely fashion.”

Sherlock’s words prompted John to ask again, this time assured that Sherlock was present and listening, “Who was that?”

“Moran. Moriarty’s anchor.” Sherlock answered absently, pulling himself upright and beckoning John to follow him into the hospital proper.

Taking a deep breath to calm the sudden surge of frustration that John felt, he counted to ten and only then did he try to speak. “Moriarty’s anchor,” he repeated. Sherlock didn’t respond, only tried to shepherd him in through the doors. John planted his feet and Sherlock nearly tripped. “He is trying to kill me because I’m your anchor.” It figured. John hadn’t asked why, hadn’t wanted to ask why he was being targeted, the question lurking in the back of his mind as Sherlock fed him all the pieces and waited for him to sort it out himself. “You didn’t think that was important for me to know?”

“I was - I am - here to protect you, but - he kills you, he wins.” Sherlock said. “Moriarty had to make sure I’d follow him, so he couldn’t kill you before, but killing you now-”

“Means you can’t come back.” John finished. “That’s rich. Well, fuck you.” John wasn’t remotely as furious as he’d thought he’d be and the expletive held none of his usual vinegar. He felt a little reckless. Sherlock’s attempt at being mysterious was par for the course, expected and familiar in a way that meant John couldn’t suppress his grin. “I guess I have to stay alive for the both of us, then.”

A slow smile crept across Sherlock’s lips. “I rather hope you do.”

**

John laid in bed contemplating the nature of second chances. His injection site throbbed, a reassuring pain that told him that the virus was well and truly on its way out of his system. He glowed faintly, the sleep shirt he’d been wearing discarded as too much coverage. Sherlock and he were both in his bed, Sherlock propped up with pillows, one wing off the edge and the other hemming John in close to his side. John lay half on feathers, half on sheets with his head leaning against Sherlock’s ribcage.

Since Sherlock had declared that skin-to-skin contact helped him reorient more swiftly, the full plane of John’s chest was pressed to Sherlock’s hip while they wore nothing but their pants. John had folded his arms across his chest, not quite sure what to do with them. He was supposed to get sleep, which is why he was laying down while Sherlock puttered about on a floating workstation, flicking his fingers through holographic representations of molecules and musical notes or whatever else he had a mind to explore.

Warm and solid against John’s cheek, Sherlock breathed evenly, his ribs expanding and rocking John’s head to the side with gentle force. John could hardly believe that he was real - or almost real. They had shared a bed before and thought nothing of it, or at least John hadn’t bothered. Now, though, John was fully aware that it was Sherlock and he was back and someone in the room had declared a love that transcended time and it wasn’t John. Also, they were in bed together, nearly naked, and it felt right in a way that left John relaxed and on the edge of sleep, exhausted after a ridiculously eventful day.

“How much longer?” John asked.

“Keen to be rid of me?” Sherlock responded, twitching the viewscreen out of his line of sight and giving John a brief smile.

It was a tease, a moment of levity, but John found himself taking it unexpectedly serious. Second chances meant rectifying the mistakes of the past. When Sherlock had shoved him out of the way and his shade had taken a bullet for John, there had been nothing left. Again. A hollow horror had crept down John’s spine and settled in his stomach. Even with an evening of John and Sherlock redecorating the apartment with all of Sherlock’s boxed belongings, the feeling was only just going away.

His reaction told him something very important. Being angry at the magnitude of the deceit Sherlock had subjected him to and being terrified of losing Sherlock again were most emphatically _not_ mutually exclusive. The afternoon’s events had shown him how fragile a second chance could be. If he were going to do anything about the feelings he still held for Sherlock, he couldn’t afford to wait.

John shook his head in response to Sherlock’s question. “Not really. Just wondering.” Sherlock raised his eyebrows. In lieu of any further explanation, John merely shook his head again.

Sherlock pulled the display back where he could see it. “Morning, most likely. The acceleration effect of being in physical contact with you for an extended period is undocumented. The window is closing noticeably, but-” He performed an eloquent shrug that rustled his pinions and rocked John where he lay. “Your guess, at this point, is as good as mine.”

They lapsed into a brief silence, Sherlock fussing with something now that he had access to a workstation and the cloud beyond - “Never underestimate the power of being able to save your work. A stable timeline is nothing to take for granted.” - and John wondering if he could say what needed to be said without sounding like an idiot.

Finally, John said, “You scared me, earlier.” Sherlock said nothing in response, but he’d stopped jabbing at the floating lights, his fingers stilling. When it became obvious that Sherlock wasn’t going to say anything no matter how long John waited, he continued, “With your popping off somewhere else so as not to be shot.”

John couldn’t be quite sure in the mixed light of holo and biolume, but he got the distinct impression that Sherlock was blushing. “Least said, soonest mended,” Sherlock said, words clipped as he tried to avoid the subject. “A momentary setback. I came back immediately upon contact with my anchor. Nothing to worry about. That was- good. Good job, John.”

John elbowed Sherlock in the hip and tried to ignore his sudden chill of fear that accompanied a series of echos and flashes of another time, another place, and of discarded gun etiquette distracting John almost entirely from the ‘thank you’ that Sherlock was attempting to give. The virus had burnt out, yes, but it had burnt out after Sherlock had appeared. John swallowed hard, his mouth suddenly dry.

He couldn’t be sure, not entirely, that Sherlock was not the lingering gift of a mutilated mind, not when everything he did reminded John of a past long gone. Though the man gunning for him lent credence to the idea that John was not going mad, John had had dreams before that felt as real as this. More real, perhaps, because feathers brushing his skin belonged to some other reality, some other waking.

Sherlock grunted, studiously avoiding his companion despite the nudge. Shrugging away his fears, John grinned at him. “You responded by instinct, so what? Not the end of the world.”

“Sentiment will be the end of me, I fear.” Sherlock responded wryly, still not looking at John as resumed jabbing at the workstation’s display.

John hadn’t expected that as an answer and he had to adjust his assumptions about why Sherlock might be embarrassed for his actions. Not merely that Sherlock had flung himself out of time to avoid the bullet without the forethought he prided himself on, but also that he’d put himself in the line of fire in the first place with the same lack of care. John let his cheek fall against Sherlock’s ribs and he closed his eyes. “Perhaps.”

Half under his breath, Sherlock said, “Fears justified twice so far, even if my death didn’t take either time.”

John opened his eyes to find Sherlock watching him and wearing an uncertain, pensive expression. Without prior thought, John unfolded his arms and grasped Sherlock’s nearest hand. It was solid, warm, real. “Don’t be dead.” The words burst from John, echos and repetitions, yes, but even more than when he’d first said them, he needed them to be true now. “Just- let this be real, if nothing else in my life has ever been real.” Whereas there had been only grief before, there was now both hope and madness and John could not be sure which would prove the greater.

He turned his head, pressing his forehead to Sherlock’s side as the great wing beneath him tucked him closer still. John touched his lips to skin, a brief kiss more to reassure himself than anything else. Then Sherlock was moving.

With an awkward slide down the bed, a complicated ballet of shifting limbs, Sherlock wrapped his arms around John’s shoulders and buried his face in John’s hair. “Not dead. Completely real.” Sherlock said, his voice vibrating through John’s skull. “I know it doesn’t seem like it now, I know, but it’s true and real and I’m here.”

A kiss became an inevitability. John tipped his head back and Sherlock curled his shoulders and there was no hesitation, no reticence. Their lips met and at first it was chaste and comforting, Sherlock offering balm for John’s doubt. Featherlight, gentle, exploratory, the kiss became an experiment on how to fit their mouths to each other as completely as Sherlock had slid back into his place in John’s life. Everything was different and everything had changed and yet-

Nothing was different and nothing had changed. Second chances.

All of the new - the variation of pressure as they sought their equilibrium, the curve of a smile on Sherlock’s lips, John shoving himself up on the bed with his elbow to bring their faces even - gave John something to believe in. Every moment that everything was _new_ and recalled no terrifying echos of the past, John relaxed into both embrace and kiss.

When he opened his mouth to Sherlock’s questing tongue, they found themselves both victim to a moment of a tentativity. Intent shifted from comfort to desire and startled them both. A hitch of the breath, a heartbeat’s pause, and they both opened their eyes to look at eachother.

John breathed heavily through his nose, staring across at Sherlock. Sherlock, for his part, had an oddly contented look on his face as he searched John’s face for the cue to proceed.

Half a smirk later, John caught Sherlock in a kiss once more and rolled them both until Sherlock was straddling him, wings freed from John’s weight and arching up toward the ceiling. Sherlock made a small noise of relief against John’s mouth as soon as he was no longer trapped beneath their paired bulk and a shiver rattled through his pinions. The new vents in John’s chest came in handy when trying to snog and breathe at the same time.

A moment later, Sherlock pulled away and panted out, “Never have I more desired to be present than I do now.” John shook his head, a slight indication of his incomprehension that Sherlock responded to with a smile. Spreading his wings until they touched either wall, brushing them across John’s belongings as he laced their fingers together and used his weight to pin them above John’s head, Sherlock said, “The window closes, but not fast enough for-”

“Doesn’t matter.” John interrupted, allowing himself to be pinned, no reason to fight the hold. The angles of Sherlock’s face were lit by his biolumes, glowing the intense red of equally intense emotion. “Doesn’t matter, whatever it is.”

“It matters.” Sherlock leaned down to speak directly into John’s ear, a low rumble that made sure that John was hard against Sherlock’s thigh. He gulped air as Sherlock spoke, light-headed and heavy-lidded and having a hard time processing that right here, right now, was his reality. Sherlock continued, apology thick in his words, “It means a kiss is all I can give you. I’m not real enough for more.”

“I’ll take it.” John turned his head to lip at the curve of Sherlock’s ear and was rewarded with a chuckle full of pleasure and promise. “Even if the sunrise tomorrow burns you away like so much fog, I’ll take a single kiss over all the regret. I lived with that for too long to want to miss this just because you’re not real.”

Sherlock smiled as he pulled away, holding himself above John, his wings dark shadows above them that shifted in the wavering light. Equal parts reassuring and amused, he said, “I _am_ real.”

“Fuck real.” John could not keep the growl from his voice, the claws he’d kept velveted sliding out as he flexed his hands and contemplated pitting his strength against Sherlocks. “Fuck tomorrow morning. Fuck you, too, for not doing this sooner.”

At that, Sherlock laughed. John didn’t, but he tensed and gave Sherlock a fierce grin. With a shake of his head, Sherlock smothered the remains of his laughter against John’s lips.

  


**

The sound of their door being kicked in woke John from a deep sleep. Sherlock sprawled at his side, one wing draped over his chest, the other trailing on the floor. His one leg hooked around John’s seemed to be the only reason Sherlock was still in bed and hadn’t been dragged over the side by the weight of his extra appendages. The low glow of a workstation floating just off the edge of the headboard warred with John’s biolumes that flickered fitfully in the half-light. It couldn’t have been much past midnight.

Sherlock had abandoned whatever he was working on and was shoving himself to his feet, one wing buffeting John hard in the sternum and making him suck air in through his vents. The pain reminded John that he hadn’t woken to stare at the man who’d shared his bed with him no matter what their evening had been occupied with.

John had his bedside drawer open and his gun out, making sure to check the magazine before he scrambled out of bed. He didn’t bother with clothes, flattening himself against the wall next to the bedroom door wearing only his pants.

He wasn’t going to win any awards for stealth any time soon; his heightened alertness made him glow like the heart of a flame, ember red and casting the room in reddened relief. Sherlock came to stand in the center, his eyes narrowed and his expression thunderous. They had lain skin to skin for the half-night they’d been granted, John asleep out of pure exhaustion not too long into their evening.

The man came through the door wearing a familiar face, and this time he wasn’t wielding a gun but a hunting knife with a serrated blade. John did not get a chance to pull the trigger. His assailant was too close, and with a maneuver that belied military training, disarmed John. Not with ease - John’s pride remained intact - but by using his leverage and a jab at John’s inner thigh with his knee. The weapon thudded on the carpet and John shoved at Moran, readying himself to dive for the gun once there was no longer a knife so close to John’s face.

John pushed, hard, and used his claws to dig into Moran’s forearms to provide the surprise he needed to break the hold. However, Moran was too well-versed in close combat to leave a weapon lying around. He snapped out a kick that sent the gun sliding across the carpet and beneath the bed.

Grabbing, ready to wrench Moran away from John, Sherlock could not make contact. He let out a hiss of frustration. “Not real enough.” Sherlock spun, narrowing missing John with his wings, and shifted to take a position behind John as they staggered further into the room, ready to lend his aid to the only person he could yet touch.

“How soon?” John asked over his shoulder, and the man in front of him frowned. Maskless, it was easy to see the sharp jaw working silently, the wan cast to his skin, and the circles beneath Moran’s eyes. He glanced in the direction that John spoken in. After a moment of almost-recognition, a tiny burst of hope flooded his features.

Moran drew back, calculated, and feinted. The knife nearly took a stripe off of John’s forearm as he brought his elbow up to block.

Sherlock tried not to get in the way, but John slammed into him anyways and forced him to retreat back across the room in frustration to fish beneath the bed. A firearm would be an advantage if he could get it to John, but almost as soon as the thought had crossed his mind, Sherlock’s furious, “I can’t even touch it. It’s now and I’m not,” rattled the windows. There was enough pure frustration in Sherlock’s voice to make John wince.

There was little he could do about Sherlock’s sudden inability to interact. John lashed out with a kick to try and take his taller opponent to the ground. Moran opened a long slice in John’s leg. Not deep, thankfully, and John used the time granted by Moran’s follow-through to retreat into the living room.

At Moran’s back, invisible and ineffectual, Sherlock raked his fingers through his hair, unable to touch, grasp, speak or distract. “Too soon and not soon enough.” He tried again to grab at Moran’s arm, at his jacket, and snarled under his breath when his fingers went straight through. “Can’t go forward or back, not any more. I’m close, but I can’t get through.”

John rather wished Sherlock could nudge himself to the future a bit and put a bar of soap underneath Moran’s weightbearing leg or something equally as unexpected. That would be perfect. Sherlock’s wings flapped in desperation, knocking the bookshelves askew. On the second downsweep, his feathers passed through the shelves.

As Moran stalked John into the living room, Sherlock paced him, his hands inside Moran’s ribcage as if he could stop his heart through sheer will alone. He fumed. “I desperately want to be now, should be, have to be, and the way won’t _open_.” The word ‘open’ came out half a howl, as impassioned as John could ever recall.

“Keep trying.” John didn’t have the breath for more, the virus having sapped his reserves of strength. His muscle memory and knowledge of the apartment’s layout were the only things keeping him alive. That and his claws. He extended them, used them when he could, and was rewarded more than once by a hiss and the slow welling of blood in the wake of his swipe. It gave John slightly less of a disadvantage, but Moran was not thrown by so little a thing as a chimera mutation.

Soldier against soldier, John could recognize enough of Moran’s attacks to know how and where to counter them without earning a fatal wound, but it was a close thing even then. It was the dirty fighting he earned blows from, swift slaps and shoves that tried his balance and dizzied him when they connected.

Then John faltered. Moran slipped inside of John’s guard and his fist slammed against John’s throat. John went down on one knee, windpipe crushed at the blow. He scrabbled at his throat, but no matter how he gasped and choked, there was no way to magically un-crush his airway.

Stumbling back a step and out of reach, Moran panted heavily and wiped sweat out of his sunken eyes. A suffocating man was little and less threat and still Moran wasted no time in flipping the knife around in his hand and readying his killing blow. He had the advantage and he was going to press it.

“John!” Sherlock called, horrified. Then he blinked out of time, leaving no shadow, no placeholder. There was nothing he could do about the descending knife or John curled in on himself in pain and surprise, no, but John had not expect him to simply go.

If John was going to have a chance to get Sherlock back, he needed to survive long enough to figure out what the fuck had just happened.

A heartbeat before Moran completed the knifestroke, John’s automatic systems stopped their spastic insistence that he needed a trachea and he sucked in a sterile breath through his vents. _Good enough_. John’s roar was a rasp forced through a crumpled voicebox as he charged, shoving the crown of his head into Moran’s stomach and knocking the wind from his attacker’s lungs.

His charge took Moran by surprise and he was able to shove the man against a wall and reverse back into the open, leaving him behind and giving them both a bit of breathing room. Moran unfolded from the headbutt, one hand still hovering over his lower ribcage protectively, and glowered. He sought and found the whistle of air across the strings of flesh that covered John’s mutations and let out a short, rueful laugh. Flipping the knife in his hand, he re-evaluated the situation. Moran’s lips quirked with a small smile of triumph.

 _Can’t blame him._ John was using mutations he’d had barely a half a day. Panting through new flesh was sending shivers of pain through his torso and his throat was burning and clicking every time he forgot that he was a bit broken there. At least he wasn’t suffocating.

What damage John had tried to do had been mitigated by his opponent’s longer reach and skill with his chosen weapon. The scratches he’d given Moran hadn’t dug deep enough to bloody his claws, more annoyance than danger since he’d had no time to relearn how to fight in any what he could actually use them.

John firmed his jaw. Maybe he could blink Moran to death with his biolumes, since a physical contest was becoming a rapidly foregone conclusion. Moran was wearing body armor. John wore nothing but pants and bruises.

They watched each other warily for their respective moments of opportunity. The stillness of strategy between two seasoned fighters stretched out between them. They sized up weaknesses, angles of attack, possible feints. John had a chance, though a slim one. Even body armor left weak points that a hand or a claw could exploit. He’d only get one chance, but he needed to take it now before his focus wavered or his endurance flagged.

John moved a fraction of a second before Moran did. They closed rapidly and Moran had his knife low and ready for the gut-puncture that would finish his quarry. Sucking in against the blow and gritting his teeth, John readied for feel of cold metal and pain as he took his chance.

Before they could meet, however, the room flooded with light and the sudden overwhelming scent of ozone as Sherlock materialized between the two of them. He reappeared mid-swing and his fist connected solidly with Moran’s face while it was still changing from determination to shock. Then Sherlock was gone again and Moran was stumbling back, his hand flying protectively toward his jaw in reflex. The knife sliced harmlessly through the air where Sherlock had stood.

John backpedaled to a halt so not to end up with a face-full of wing and clung to the back of the nearest chair. He met Moran’s look and they shared a brief moment of wonder and disbelief. The other man’s face held a mixture of relief and joy that seemed so out of place to him that John started to rasp out a laugh. Moran’s fierce grin lasted until Sherlock reappeared behind him and wrapped an arm around his neck.

The knife came up and Moran slashed over his shoulder at Sherlock, who disappeared once more when the blade came too close to his person. When Moran darted forward, John’s laughter died and he pushed himself to his feet to meet him as best he could. To his astonishment, instead of attacking Moran flung himself out the door and down the stairs. The pounding of booted feet on the stairs was followed by a shriek and a doorslam.

John stared at the door with it’s shattered latch and then down at his bleeding leg. He could barely credit his own senses.

His “Sherlock?” came out a wheeze that rattled alarmingly in his throat. He hobbled to the lightswitch. There were signs of a fight, but no Sherlock. Moran had seen him though, John was sure of that, because his grin had not appeared until Sherlock had.

John rubbed at his neck, sharp pain beneath his fingers as he took stock of the damage both to himself and the flat.

“Are you alright, dear?” Mrs. Hudson called up the stairs.

“Sherlock?” John ventured again, squeezing the word out before he went back to depending on his vents. He couldn’t very well respond to Mrs. Hudson and he was afraid if he left the room he’d wake up. Still nothing. The flat remained silent and empty, only the shadows cast by John’s own biolumes moving as he breathed. There had to be reality somewhere in this madness. He was bleeding on the rug.

Arms enfolded him from behind and John nearly leapt out of his own skin. Wings followed in the embrace, overlapping in front of him to block out the view of his battered flat. Sherlock’s warm, worried voice in his ear said, “I thought he had you. Are you well?” John responded with a noise not unlike a rudely punctured squeaky toy and snorted. Sherlock spun him around and his eyebrows crawled together. Concerned, he raised tipped John’s chin up to survey the area. “You’re not.”

John grabbed the back of Sherlock’s neck with both hands and, much as he had in the park, yanked him down into a kiss. Sherlock draped one arm around John’s shoulders and curled his fingers around John’s waist to pull him closer, wrapping them both with wings that seemed to be doing just fine in the here-and-now despite their impossibility.

From below, they both heard Mrs. Hudson’s footsteps on the lower stairs. “John?”

Breaking away, John waved off Sherlock’s queries and seized his hand. Before anything, before cleaning the score down his leg or the inevitable visit to the hospital for his throat, before finding his gun lost under the bed or worrying about the splintered door latch, John needed confirmation that Sherlock was no less real for anyone else. He needed the reassurance of someone other than a man trying to kill him, who had done nothing but smile and run, that he had escaped the virus with his mind intact.

Dragging Sherlock through the door and down the stairs, he halted halfway and hauled Sherlock around to precede him down to where their landlady stood, staring at the pair of them. She had stopped a handful of steps from the bottom, watching the door to their flat with an anxious crease between her eyebrows and a mobile in her hand, her thumb poised over the call button. John gave Sherlock a push, presenting him to Mrs. Hudson, though they were both nearly nude and he was glowing as fitfully as a dying halogen.

John stopped caring about anything so irrelevant as indecency, though, when Mrs. Hudson’s eyes filled with tears and she reached up from the lower step as Sherlock descended. Her hand touched his cheek and she broke into a slow smile filled with wonder and affection. “John said you were coming home and I am shamed to say I didn’t believe a word.” She paid little attention to the tears tracking her cheeks as Sherlock halted a step above to wrap her, too, in a hug.

John’s knees failed him and he sat hard on the stairs, covering his eyes with his arm. He couldn’t have spoken even if he’d been physically able.

Relief coursed through his veins, a heady drug that left him reeling and giddy. _Real._ John believed with all of his heart, but the mind doubted, was suspect. With the proof of another living, breathing, visible human being before him, he held no more doubts. It was glorious. He leaned against the wall as his adrenaline crash wiped out the last of his strength.

Pressing his hands to his throat and feeling a surge of pain enough to make the edges of his vision gray momentarily, he wheezed out a laugh that drew their attention back to him and his injuries. “John?” Mrs. Hudson asked. There was concern and questions from both of them, but he just shook his head and did his best to communicate with his hands.

John reveled in the sound of Sherlock’s voice as he explained to Mrs. Hudson just why she’d been startled by a man racing down the stairs and what was wrong with John that he could not answer. When they hauled him to his feet, John grasped the crook of one of Sherlock’s wings to steady himself as they started to move him down the stairs. He dug his claws into the feathers, baring his teeth in nothing like a smile when Sherlock looked at him in askance.

The stairs were too narrow for Sherlock’s wings. For some reason that fact made John want to laugh until he cried.

John tightened his grip in Sherlock’s feathers and dragged him close enough to kiss, ignoring Mrs. Hudson’s laugh from somewhere beyond. When he pulled away, Sherlock regarded him with amusement. Over Sherlock’s shoulder, Mrs. Hudson covered her smile with one hand and raised her eyebrows at John. John offered her an unrepentant grin.

Sherlock laced his fingers with John’s, leading him down the stairs and to the kitchen. Even when they got there, John refused to let go. He’d earned his fucking second chance and he’d be damned if it went to waste.


End file.
